Nature Reviews Neuroscience was launched in October 2000, just after the ‘Decade of the Brain’ had come to a close and in the year that saw the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel “for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system”. In the quarter of a century since then, the journal has continually strived to meet its aim of covering the breadth and depth of modern neuroscience.

“the journal has continually strived to meet its aim of covering the breadth and depth of modern neuroscience”

To mark the 25th anniversary, alongside the Review content in this issue, we feature our first World View and Tools of the Trade articles, as well as an expanded selection of Comment and Journal Club pieces.

World View articles will draw on a researcher’s personal experience or expertise to make a call for action. In this issue, Nicole Rust puts the case for participating in the public communication of science, arguing that it can benefit one’s own research, and offers some advice for how to get into writing about science for a broad audience. This will be the first in a series of World View articles that discuss communicating science beyond scientific arenas.

Tools of the Trade articles will showcase a new technology, experimental technique, or computational or statistical method, highlighting what we might learn from its use. To launch these articles, Mengting Han discusses the development and functional use of a programmable method for perturbing endogenous RNA localization, termed CRISPR-TO.

The Comment section in this issue covers an array of topics. Megan Carey discusses the ALBA Network, which aims to foster equity and diversity in neuroscience and now has about 2,000 members across the world. Julia Sacher and Ingo Bechmann highlight the insufficient amount of attention that has been paid to women’s brain health and call for more research, particularly relating to hormonal transitions across the lifespan. Chengyu Li and Wu Wei discuss progress and challenges in developing brain cell atlases, while Davi Bock discusses the considerable advancements that have been made in connectomics research in recent years. Sadra Sadeh and Claudia Clopath examine the potential of the emerging field of NeuroAI, and Ann Kennedy discusses the use of top-down conceptual and bottom-up mechanistic models in theoretical neuroscience.

In the Journal Club section, Mariam Aly discusses a study investigating amnesia, Benjamin Cowley examines a study related to closed-loop neurophysiology, and Nina Rzechorzek covers a study focused on torpor.

To end, we would like to thank all the researchers who have contributed across the years to the journal, be it as authors, as referees or in some other capacity, and we thank you, our readers, for your continued interest in the content that we publish. We hope you enjoy the issue.